In addition to supporting our site through our advertisers or by subscribing to Phoronix Premium, another way you can support our Linux hardware and software efforts is by clicking the links below when shopping at your favorite Internet retailers, for which we generate a commission off whatever you purchase. It's that easy, thanks!

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.0-rc2 kernel this morning rather than on Sunday night due to having a i915 DRM graphics issue with one of his Apple Mac Mini computers. Aside from fixing up one of Torvalds' old systems, the Linux 4.0-rc2 kernel is a relatively mundane release.

BPF continues marching forward as a universal, in-kernel virtual machine for the Linux kernel. The Berkeley Packet Filter was originally designed for network packet filtering but has since been extended as eBPF to support other non-network subsystems via the bpf syscall. Here's some more details on this in-kernel virtual machine.

While hearing "PowerVR" tend to make Linux users cringe over memories of past Linux driver issues with Imagination's binary blobs, Imagination is among the vendors now experimenting with the new Vulkan graphics API and SPIR-V IR. Imagination too has already put out one of the first demos using this new graphics API.

Today is a very exciting day for those into open standard graphics and compute APIs! While driver implementations aren't expected until later in 2015, the next-generation OpenGL standard is being announced as the Vulkan API, the provisional specification to OpenCL 2.1 is being released, and SPIR-V is set to make its debut as the IR for both Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1.

Our new Linux benchmarking test farm that's much cleaner and more organized than the current implementation shown at LinuxBenchmarking.com is a step closer to reality. By the end of this week this new farm controlled by Phoromatic and powered by OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite should be powered up.

As a follow-up to last week's "Vulkan" trademark by the Khronos Group and mulling it over this weekend, I've now been able to confirm with two independent entities that Vulkan is indeed the next-gen graphics API designed as the successor to OpenGL for high performance 2D/3D graphics.

1 March

Last month there was a long overdue development update on Kdenlive, an open-source video editor associated with the KDE camp. Today comes more exciting news for anyone using this video editor on Linux.

I'm still working on any sort of possible confirmation from the Khronos Group and other OpenGL stakeholders whether Vulkan is the name of the next-generation OpenGL API, but alas, on the weekend and being just a few days before the announcement, nothing has been confirmed.

While recently modern Intel hardware is negatively talked about the most when it comes to needing binary blobs / binary-only microcode to work with the open-source Coreboot, other hardware can be problematic too.

28 February

This month on Phoronix the most popular news articles were about the Linux 4.0 kernel (formerly known as Linux 3.20) but also popular were LLVM-related stories, Raspberry Pi 2 news, and the usual Linux graphics coverage.

The Khronos Group filed a trademark request earlier this month with the USPTO over the name Vulkan as it pertains to drawing 2D/3D graphics... Vulkan might be the name of the next-generation OpenGL specification due to be announced next week.

While Mozilla doesn't devote nearly as many resources to their Thunderbird email client as they do to Firefox and there isn't as many high-profile releases for this project in a while, Thunderbird adoption continues to climb.

With OpenBenchmarking.org having turned four years old a few days ago earlier this week I provided a look at the most popular/used benchmarks/tests on our open cloud service while in this article is a look at the most viewed test results.

While the first release candidate of the Linux 4.0 kernel is barely one week old, Intel's open-source graphics driver development team already has changes queued up for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.1

The release of Xfce 4.12 is hopefully being realized this weekend. The release hasn't taken place at the time of writing, but there's been commits to update translations as well as to add the new wallpaper of Xfce 4.12.

Back in December, Phoronix delivered the first article about An Ubuntu Tablet Inspired By The Ubuntu Edge Is Coming. From the company responsible for this tablet inspired by the failed Ubuntu Edge smartphone we have some new specifications of the tablet they plan to ship with Ubuntu.

The latest solid-state drive being added to one of our Linux test farm systems is the Samsung 850 EVO. Prior to commissioning this drive in one of the systems, I ran some benchmarks against a few other solid-state drives while testing with the EXT4 file-system on Ubuntu Linux.

Here's another quick update on the process of building out the new open-source benchmarking server farm... The construction of the room is going along nicely and I'm currently evaluating a few different server chassis and racks/cabinets.